Banú Muldasheva /Shymyldyq/ 

In Kazakh wedding rituals, Shymyldyq (usually a white curtain with embroidery or made by a mixed technique) is an obligatory ritual object. It hides the newly-married bride in the groom's house.  Shymyldyq hangs for up to a year or more and later it serves as a curtain in front of the bed. This curtain is considered a family heirloom and is passed down from generation to generation. The curtain can be part of the bride's dowry (zhasau). Shymdyldyk symbolises the boundary hiding the bride's face from prying eyes - a symbolic "shelter" in the first years of marriage, when the bride is in a "liminal" state.

Banú Muldasheva’s installation consists of three strips of fabric with industrial printed collages. Here you can see the scans from her daily sketchbook and also flowers that Banú regularly brings to her temporary house in Tbilisi in order to create a feeling of home and safety during the first years of her emigration. The work calls into question the concept of personal identity, national traditions, ethnicity, belonging and psychological vulnerability during the process of changing "one's place of living".


Scan, digital collage, industrial textile printing.
Tbilisi, 2024
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